Panic in the Streets (film)

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Panic in the Streets (1950)
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Panic in the Streets
20th Century Fox
Release date
  • September 15, 1950 (1950-09-15)
Running time
96 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$1,400,000[1]

Panic in the Streets is a 1950 American

New Orleans, Louisiana, and features numerous scenes around the city and Port of New Orleans along the Mississippi River and showing various New Orleans citizens in speaking and non-speaking roles.[2]

The film tells the story of

Medieval era pandemic disease in Europe known as the "Black Death"), after Reed determines a waterfront homicide victim is also an index case and the first to be found carrying the disease. Co-stars include Barbara Bel Geddes (as Reed's wife Nancy), Jack Palance (in his film debut) and Zero Mostel – the latter two play crooks, associates of the victim who had prompted the public health investigation. The film was also the debut of Tommy Rettig, (first farm boy owner of collie dog "Lassie" in 1950s TV show "Lassie
" who played the Reeds' son.

The film was released later on

20th Century Fox as part of the "Fox Film Noir collection", along with Laura and Call Northside 777
, on March 15, 2005.

The score was composed by

Alfred Newman
.

The film was originally named Port of Entry, subsequently later as Outbreak, and ultimately Panic in the Streets.[3]

Plot

After brawling over a card game in the wharf area of New Orleans, a man named Kochak, suffering visibly from a flu-like illness, is killed by gangster Blackie and his two flunkies, Kochak's cousin Poldi and a man named Fitch. They leave the body on the docks, and later when the dead man, who carries no identification, is brought to the

U.S. Public Health Service
. Reed is enjoying a rare day off with his wife Nancy and their son Tommy, but decides to inspect the body.

After careful examination, he determines that Kochak had "

inoculated. He also orders that the dead man's identity be traced to determine as well as his comings and goings and anyone else in contact with him during the previous few days. Reed meets with people from the New Orleans Mayor's office, the police commissioner
and other city police and public health officials, but they are inexperienced and unfortunately stupidly skeptical of his claims. Eventually, however, his impassioned pleas convince them that they have forty-eight hours to save New Orleans from the plague. Reed must also convince Police Detective Captain Tom Warren who is assigned to the case and the others that the press must not be notified, because previous experiences in other cases told them that report of a plague would spread mass panic and riots and make it far more difficult to search and find the infected line of people.

The New Orleans police and medical / public health professionals investigation group discuss how to deal with public safety in the possible pandemic emergency in the 1950 film "Panic in the Streets"..

Detective Warren and his men begin to interview Slavic immigrants, as it has been determined by autopsy and scientific evidence testing the blood, that the body may be of Armenian, Czech or mixed blood descent (in this 1950s era of pre - DNA biological heredity knowledge). Burdened by the knowledge that the massive investigation despite their best efforts, has little chance of success (like old saying of "finding a needle in a haystack"), Lt. Cmdr. Reed accuses Police Captain Warren of not taking the threat seriously enough. In turn, Warren admits that he thinks Officer Reed is driven and ambitious and trying to use the situation to further his career. Reed, angry, decides to take matters into his own hands and, acting on a hunch that the man may have entered the city's river port illegally, goes to the nearby National Maritime Union's hiring hall and passes out copies of the dead man's picture among the seamen / sailors. Although the workers tell Officer Reed that seamen never talk, he still goes to a café next door hoping to find that someone will come forward with a tip. Eventually a young woman shows up and takes Reed to see her friend Charlie, who reluctantly admits that he worked aboard the freighter ship, the S.S. Nile Queen, upon which the already ill man was smuggled.

Meanwhile, Fitch, who was questioned by Warren but claimed to know nothing, goes to the crook Blackie and warns him about the investigation. Blackie plans to get out of town, but begins to suspect that his

hold, the seamen then permit Reed and Warren to inoculate and question them, revealing in the process that Kochak boarded at Oran in North Africa and was fond of shish kebab. With this lead, Reed and Warren canvas the city's Greek restaurants
, and just after they leave one such establishment, Blackie arrives to meet his partner Poldi, who is now very ill. A short time later, Reed receives word that a woman, Rita, has died of the fever and realizes that she was the wife of the Greek restaurant proprietor John Mefaris that he repeatedly questioned before and who apparently had earlier lied about having served food to Kochak and hidden the truth. And now his wife is dead because she told him to lie to the detectives and say he knew nothing.

Reed returns back to headquarters to discover that a muckraking investigative newspaper

pathogenic
bacteria is endangering the city. Officer Reed is now impressed when the deeply committed yet unorthodox police detective caption Warren resorts to old-fashioned strong-arm methods and throws the reporter into jail to keep his mouth shut and quiet. Late in the evening, a beleaguered Reed returns home to his family for a cup of coffee and his wife announces that she is pregnant. She then tries to restore her husband's flagging self-confidence and lift up his spirits.

A few hours later, Reed and Warren learn that the

mooring line
, and falls into the water. The men are finally captured and in custody heading for the hospital and jail. His work finally done, Reed heads for home, and on the way, Capt. Warren offers to give him some of the smuggled perfume that Poldi had indeed received from Kochak for Mrs. Reed. Back at his house, Reed hears the blaring radio news announces the resolution of the crisis reporting some details of the story, while a proud Nancy Reed greets her public health officer husband who was responsible for it all.

Cast

Pre-production

The production of Panic in the Streets underwent several rounds of edits with the effort to abide by the

Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code). Originally titled Port of Entry, the temporary script of the film was sent on November 11, 1949, to Joseph Breen, the film censor with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America who applied the Production Code to film production. Joseph Breen himself indicated in threads of letters with Colonel Jason S. Joy, the Director of Public Relations of the 20th Century Fox, the changes needed for the script. Suggestions such as "Violet must not be suggestive of a prostitute", "We assume there will be no suggestion that the police officer is killed", and "The scene of Martinez and the mattress falling should not be too realistically gruesome," were made. On December 20, 1949, in Joy's letter responding to the suggestion of Breen, the film had been renamed Outbreak. The sensitive content of the film, especially the scenes pointed out by Breen, were not fully changed until after a of couple back and forth letters that lasted for around 3 months. Ultimately, the film was named Panic in the Streets in the final version of the synopsis on March 8, 1950. Approved by the Production Code Administration (PCA) on March 14, 1950, the film officially entered the production stage.[4]

Reception

Box office

The film failed to recover its costs at the box office which

Darryl Zanuck blamed in part on location shooting. He felt if the film had been made for $850,000 it would have been profitable.[1]

Critical response

The New York Times gave the film a mixed review and wrote, "Although it is excitingly presented, Panic in the Streets misses the mark as superior melodrama because it is not without obvious, sometimes annoying exaggeration that demands more indulgence than some spectators may be willing to contribute. However, there is an electric quality to the climax staged in a warehouse on the New Orleans waterfront that should compensate for minor annoyances which come to the surface spasmodically in Panic in the Streets."[5]

Variety magazine liked the film and wrote, "This is an above-average chase meller. Tightly scripted and directed, it concerns the successful attempts to capture a couple of criminals, who are germ carriers, in order to prevent a plague and panic in a large city. The plague angle is somewhat incidental to the cops-and-bandits theme...There is vivid action, nice human touches and some bizarre moments. Jack Palance gives a sharp performance."[6]

New Orleans film critic David Lee Simmons wrote in 2005, "The film noir elements come from the movie's use of post-war

German Expressionist and Italian Neo-Realist techniques. Kazan admired how the Expressionists used chiaroscuro lighting to heighten emotion, and he related to the Neo-Realists' cinéma vérité portrayals of those living on the margin of society. Panic offered him a chance to explore these styles further by experimenting with cinematography and casting real people. After working with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood – Dorothy McGuire, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Dana Andrews, Gregory Peck and Ethel Barrymore – Kazan wanted to go in the opposite direction. To suit the needs of this picture and his new approach, he recruited not only lesser stars, but also some of his rougher cronies from the New York stage scene, and on top of that several New Orleanians with varied levels of acting experience."[7]

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes retrospectively collected 24 reviews and gave the film a score of 96%, with an average rating of 7.46 out of 10.[8]

Awards

Wins

Nominations

  • Venice Film Festival: Golden Lion, Elia Kazan; 1950.
  • Writers Guild of America: WGA Award, Best Written American Drama, Richard Murphy; The Robert Meltzer Award (Screenplay Dealing Most Ably with Problems of the American Scene), Richard Murphy; 1951.

References

  1. ^ a b Memo from Darryl F Zanuck to Elia Kazan 1 July 1952, Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck, Grove Press, 1993 p 214
  2. IMDb Edit this at Wikidata
    .
  3. ^ "AFI|Catalog". catalog.afi.com. Retrieved 2019-02-14.
  4. ^ Production Code Administration. PANIC IN THE STREETS, 1950. Motion Picture Association of America. Production Code Administration records, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
  5. ^ The New York Times. Film review, August 5, 1950. Last accessed: February 8, 2008.
  6. ^ Variety. Film review, 1950. Last accessed: April 6, 2010.
  7. ^ Gambit Weekly film review April 5, 2005: Widespread Panic Retrieved 2011-11-25
  8. ^ "Panic in the Streets". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Retrieved 2017-01-07.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Panic in the Streets (film).
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